by G.N. Lewis

If something is yours you have power over it; you can make it into whatever you wish. It will change according to your plans.

But have you power over your self? Can you make your body larger or smaller or let it be this or that as you desire?

If it is not governed by your power but by its own laws and processes then it is not yours. If it were the body would not be involved in sickness for you would be able to make it be whatever you wished. Admittedly one has control over the body to an extent but not as much as one has over this house or any other possession. Why?

Your body was once very much more delicate and smaller than it is now. Now it is bigger and stronger. It will get weaker and degenerate later on. This body which you call yours — has it developed and deteriorated according to your will? Or perhaps the question of ownership does not arise — the body being subject to the same laws of nature as everything else, i.e., birth, decay, and death.

If this is so, should one be concerned or unconcerned regarding the body? If neglected, the natural processes of destruction act quickly, disease and death soon resulting. Therefore food, exercise, and clothing must be used to maintain it and to stop the natural processes being accelerated.

Do people feed and dress the body for maintenance only, and, if not, why? Take a person who dresses only to keep his body protected from the elements. What’s wrong with this? Should he be criticized and, if he is, for what? Because others don’t dress similarly doesn’t mean he’s doing something wrong. Someone may say he looks ugly and unsightly but how did we learn what ugliness was in the first place? Is the person criticizing him or his clothes? Well, “him” is not the body; the person criticizing him is not taking offense at the body but just at the clothes.

This is where opinion together with vanity creep in and facts become concealed.

Leaving the body let us turn to another aspect of self — feeling.

Say a man tries to grasp something which continually slips through his fingers. Can he say that thing is his? He tries to keep it but he can never clutch it solidly and he would never dream of calling that thing his own.

But say he has a fountain pen. That really seems to be his own. It is always with him and it keeps its shape and doesn’t change very much.

How about feelings — happiness, indifference, and pain? Are not these like the first example? How can we ever say feelings are our own? If they were, happiness would be ours for the rest of our life and not an illusive thing which comes and goes against our wishes.

Body is born, it decays and dies. Likewise we find on investigation that exactly the same is true for feelings. The body does not come from nothing. It starts off by the fusing of two cells from mother and father. By way of nourishment it grows and develops. Then it dies.

Feeling is born of sense-impingement; e.g., eye and material shape lead to sense impingement, which leads to visual consciousness which leads to feeling — pleasant, indifferent or painful according to whether or not what has been seen is liked or disliked as a result of past experience.

Thus we see how feeling is born. But this feeling changes. If a painful feeling arises we are not content but crave to get away from it. Alternatively if we have perceived something that gives a pleasing feeling we long to keep this feeling and try to possess whatever has caused it to arise.

Why don’t feelings last? Because the very things from which they arise do not last. Therefore if we do not grasp after feelings we never suffer. Feelings are continually born and continually die but the body takes a long time to do so.

If we cannot call body our own, how much less so is this true of feelings?

Let us now examine a third aspect of ourselves — perception.

What do we perceive and is it we who actually perceive? Perception is the recognition of sense-impingements. How is it born?

I hear a loud noise and recognize that a door has been slammed. What is the basis of this recognition? Firstly, without the ear no sound would be heard; therefore the ear is a necessary basis. The sound impinges on the ear, this being sensory impingement. From this perception arises, but like feelings it does not last and soon dies away, another rising in its place. Do I enter into this perception? Do I perceive the door slamming? No. We have definitely seen that perception arose of its own accord, with oneself not being involved at all. Well, if body, feeling and perception are not “me,” what is?

Before this can be answered there is yet another aspect of ourselves and this is volitional action. Here surely we shall find our true self. I say to a friend “I am going to do that” and I keep to what I’ve said. Here it appears a deliberate choice has been made between doing two specific things: either I will or I won’t. How does the will or act of choosing arise, or is it there all the time? Does it only come into force when we have to make a choice? On investigation we find that this is so; for example: I’m going to ride my bicycle tonight. This is a deliberate choice. I could have gone to the cinema or for a walk. Why did I choose riding? Does volition come into this at all? What other volitional tendencies are there?

I have killed a man. Surely volition was there. But if I ask myself why I wanted to kill him, several interesting things come to light. For argument’s sake let us say he murdered my wife. I was very attached to her. He took something away from me which I wanted. Missing the pleasurable feelings which were continually aroused by my wife’s company, a painful feeling took its place when I lost her and I craved to get the former feeling back. The only satisfaction for me was to get rid of the object (the man) which caused the painful feeling to arise and therefore I killed him.

So we see from this example that the volitional drive (the desire to kill) had a basis for arising and we see also that after arising it passed away on completion of its primary object (the death of a man).

Volition therefore is a conditioned force directed specifically toward something, e.g., I can arouse myself to apply my mind to something. But, as just proved, volition is a conditioned phenomenon. Can I therefore be equated with volition? If so, I only exist when volition is present; when it passes away I die also. But we say we are present all the time — therefore I cannot be equated with volition.

In conclusion we can state that if I say, “I’m going to do this or that,” what this really means is that this or that is going to be done, not by me but through cause and necessity.

Well, we still have not found ourselves; yet there is only one more aspect of ourselves to consider — consciousness.

Are you conscious, am I conscious? “Yes,” is the usual immediate answer. If this were not so you would say, “I’d be unconscious.” Can you be conscious without being conscious of anything? Most people would say not. Let us find out what are the factors involved in being conscious.

Can one be conscious without a body? Not that we know of, so we can assume from this that consciousness arises dependent on the body. Will there be consciousness if no sense-organs are in the body? We can categorically state that there will not be. So our second step is that consciousness is dependent on the sense-organs. Will there be consciousness with body and sense-organs and no internal or external sense-impingement? Again we can say definitely, “No.” Given sense-impingement shall we be conscious? Yes, but it will not be a very meaningful consciousness. We shall see a conglomeration of colors, hear noises, smell things, have bodily sensations, and taste things, but not be able to recognize them. If perception is missing one cannot say, “I am conscious.”

We have already discussed perception and shown that it is not one’s real self. Sense-consciousness, together with perception, gives us our awareness of things, but is there an “I” who is aware? If you say, “I am conscious of a vase of flowers on the table,” are you really conscious of it? By our investigation we have tried to show that you do not enter into is at all and that consciousness, like all the other aspects of self, has birth, decay, and death.

To fall into the delusion that the body, feelings, perception, volitional action, and consciousness are you is to suffer because unfortunately they are not of you and you are not of them, and you cannot expect them ever to give satisfaction for very long.

In conclusion I would say that the more disgusted one becomes with compounded things the closer one gets to things that give lasting happiness.

— From “The Maha Bodhi,” May 1964.
Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013
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